This is the day that we leave Dublin for the road trip. That means we are getting a car, that means we are driving on the left, that means I feel like I am getting sick at the thought.
But first we had a morning to kill. Steve and I love old history, artifacts and archaeology. We thought the museum called Dublinia would give us a detailed view of the Viking presence here in Dublin, something that would make transparent the layers of occupation under our feet. Not quite.
Dublinia is for kids. It is Disney with no animatronics. It is gory papier-mache battlers, wild-eyed mannequins in bear shirts (Ber - serk is "bear shirt" is bezerk), Catholic clerics being slaughtered, replicas of docks, markets, kitchens, and ships. There is a whole exhibit on the use of latrines with a expressive guy in a tunic with his pants down - a loud speaker adds farting and groaning. Thank God they refrained from smell-around, oh wait, they didn't. It is for kids.
We did find an actual tunic and pants-wearing, amber and knife bedecked Irishman showing how coins were made. We talked to him for about a half hour. He is married to an American and spends winters in Phoenix exhibiting authentic medieval crafts at the big Renaissance Fair there. (He is not with Society for Creative Anachronism for those of you who might wonder). At the very end of the exhibit Dublinia discussed archaeological techniques and displayed maybe six authentic artifacts. Those six artifacts were part of a room displaying a huge Dubliner protest —using photos of marchers and newspaper articles— protesting the construction of Dublin's City Council building's modern concrete and glass complex that placed itself squarely and forever on top of the hastily assessed actual site of the large Viking village that began the city. The artifacts were a small portion of what they did manage to find. When you leave the Dublinia building you realize you are directly across from the street from this site of cultural self-immolation. The modern building does little to provide consolation.
This image is already captioned, double click to read it
Moving on.
We rented a small car in downtown Dublin. The young man at the desk (Steve thought he was about thirteen) asked us how long we were going to be in Ireland. We answered a month, and without a second's space he replied "What could you possibly do for a month in Ireland? " When we asked him to give directions out to the highway, he said " Turn right and then you are on your own"
No truer words were ever spoken. We lost ourselves amongst tiny roads, unmarked, and had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA where we were. I will report that it was neither my nor Steve's finest hour of composure nor mutual treatment. Steve made a few errors, classic ones, which he now allows me to share. He turned left into the right lane, with me screaming at him to pull left. He soon overcompensated by running up onto the left curb of a road that fortunately had no parked cars. After screaming and detaching myself from the gear console, I was literally shaking. Adrenaline was pumping non-stop, I started to have stress-induced asthma. Everything about driving on the left is WRONG, everything I ever have been taught— I am supposed to undo instantly. All of my goody two shoe nature and strict adherence to law has been ripped from its moorings. The sun is rising in the goddamn west I tell you. Only the relative peace of the less complex arrangement of an actual marked freeway led to any calm. My other tranquilizer was our trusty phone that led us through every turn. I clutched it a little too hard, making sure we did everything it said to get out of Dublin and get to Cashel, our next destination.
Cashel is the birthplace of my great-grandfather Patrick Butler who left Ireland at the age of fourteen. The possibly apocryphal story is that he ran the Irish flag up the Castle Cashel in around 1855 and his parents, rather than see him go to jail for treason, placed him on a hay cart for the west coast of Ireland and he was on the boat to America and New York relatives within a week. My question for our five days here is simply - could this be true? Was this a story my grandfather told to garner Irish revolutionary points and bragging rights? Was it to cover-up the real reason he came to America alone—perhaps he had gotten into less glamorous trouble? Did his family just send him to America as the one sowing of one seed that the oldest son might reap benefit from?
Cashel is a lovely place set in a broad valley, the once walled city lies at the base of a limestone outcrop atop which have been iron age fortifications, fortified thatch-roofed villages, the seat of the Munster kings, and then around 1100 AD, the first Romanesque church in Ireland (with colorful frescoes found under reforming Protestant whitewash) and then a huge gothic cathedral. This complex is the rightfully famous Rock of Cashel. Our bed and breakfast (O'Brien's Cashel Lodge) is at the base of this with unobstructed views of the Rock and Hore Abbey (named Hore as its Cistercian monks wore undyed sheep wool robes that were as white as hoarfrost) in our front yard. Note the cosmically beautiful photographs and soak it all in.
Rock of Cashel from our B and B, an unobstructed incredible view, note all of the jackdaw crows
Hore Abbey, across the street from our B & B
Late evening light at Hore Abbey
This is our B & B —O'Brien's Cashel Lodge. We are in the upstairs room, left, a converted cow barn
Join me tomorrow as we begin our investigations of this story on "yet another exciting entry."
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